Garrison Common History: Northeast Liberty Village

The 45 acres bounded by Dufferin, King, Strachan and the CN mainline linking Toronto and Hamilton, known as Liberty Village after one of its main streets, was once part of the military reserve surrounding Fort York. Indeed, the 1813 Battle of York may have spilled into the area, although most fighting took place on what are now the CNE Grounds and on the open land immediately west of the fort. Later, the Liberty Village area was given over in stages to railways, heavy industry and a prison.

The history of its development divides conveniently into two parts along a diagonal line formed by the original Grand Trunk Western line from Toronto to Georgetown, later sold to the Toronto, Grey & Bruce Railway, and now replaced partly by East Liberty Street. The triangle northeast of this diagonal, up to King and over to Strachan, was developed first between 1865 to 1900. Very little of its original fabric survives. The other part southwest of the diagonal, down to the CN mainline and over to Dufferin, dates almost entirely from the early 20th century. Most of the buildings constructed there, with the notable exception of the Mercer Reformatory, are still standing.

Railways were thrown helter-skelter across the Liberty Village lands in the 1850s, but another decade passed before the first industry was located there. About 1865 the Toronto Steel, Iron and Railway Works Company was established to make rails, axles, wheels, switches and points. It stood on the west side of Strachan just north of the diagonal rail corridor. In 1872 the company’s premises and machinery were taken over by the Canada Car Company, which had negotiated to do some of its manufacturing using prison labour in workshops within the walls of the Central Prison then being constructed on an adjoining site.

Dana Ashdown, in his splendid book, Iron and Steam: A History of the Locomotive and Railway Car Builders of Toronto (Toronto: Robin Brass Studio, 1999) details in a masterful way the short history of this arrangement from the prison’s opening in 1874 to the company’s demise in 1879. Two years later the property was sold to a firm of iron founders and machinists in Guelph that moved its operations to Toronto and was reorganized as John Inglis & Sons. For over a century until 1989, Inglis and its successors occupied this site and much of the former prison property, evolving from a manufacturer of heavy engines and armaments into a maker of consumer goods and appliances, particularly washing machines. Now a tide of town houses has taken Inglis’s place.